Hasan Minhaj’s “New Brown America”

The comedian Hasan Minhaj’s new Netflix comedy special, “Homecoming King,” mines the gap between him and his immigrant parents for pathos as well as humor.

COURTESY NETFLIX

“I would say it is an honor to do this, but that would be an alternative fact. It is not,” the comedian Hasan Minhaj said while warming up the room at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April. “No one wanted to do this, so of course it falls in the hands of an immigrant.” As host, the thirty-one-year-old was tasked with tapping humor out of a stubbornly humorless situation: the absence of the President at the event, and the absence of any good will between his Administration and the press he’d derided as the “enemy of the people.” Minhaj pulled it off, landing his burns cogently, boyishly. “Jeff Sessions couldn’t be here tonight. He was too busy doing a pre-Civil War enactment”; “Frederick Douglass isn’t here, and that’s because he’s dead. Someone please tell the President.” In his role on “The Daily Show,” which he joined, as a correspondent, in 2014, Minhaj’s segments have been distinguished by a similar knowingness about the absurdities of American racism. “Have I pretended to be Puerto Rican a few times since 9/11?” he said in one segment about Trump’s Islamophobia. “Claro que sí.” Minhaj smartly leverages his identity—son of immigrants, Indian-American, Muslim—giving himself license to expose realities that his monocultural peers can’t, or won’t, perceive.

In his new comedy special, “Homecoming King,” which premièred on Netflix at the end of May, Minhaj tells an origin story that begins with his parents’ marriage and ends with his audition for Jon Stewart. Minhaj grew up in Davis, California, “with a bunch of Ryan Lochtes.” His parents married in Aligarh, India. He was born in America, and spent the first eight years of his life alone with his father, a chemist, while his mother, who had returned to India, was training to become a doctor. When she eventually joined them in the U.S., she brought with her a five-year-old daughter, Ayesha, who Hasan did not know existed. (“You brought her out like ‘Maury’ for immigrants, Dad,” Minhaj says.) Like Aziz Ansari in the “Parents” episode of “Master of None,” Minhaj spends much of his show traversing the gap between himself and the immigrant parents who raised him, and mining the comparisons for pathos as well as humor; many viewers (myself included) have said that “Homecoming King” elicits not just laughter but tears.

The special was adapted from Minhaj’s 2015 Off Broadway play of the same name, and its narrative style is more akin to an episode of “The Moth” podcast than to a typical standup show. (Minhaj first performed elements of what would become “Homecoming King” for “The Moth,” in 2015.) Minhaj is preppy and polished, his carefully choreographed routine aided by images projected on a screen behind him. “She was like the iPhone 8 of Aligarh. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, my God, have you heard of Seema? She’s very slim and slender. Her family owns a camera,’ ” he says as a photo of his mother, dressed in a red langa, appears onscreen. A Rockwellian animation of Minhaj biking in a suit foreshadows the story that gives the show its title, about a shocking incident of genteel racism that Minhaj experienced in high school. Over-production can kill a good comedy special, or risk making it seem like a TED Talk, but Minhaj shrewdly uses imagery to underscore the Americanness of his story. At one point, a fluorescent rendering of the flag, its stars disintegrating, frames Minhaj as he describes an incident from his teen years, after 9/11, when he left his home, in Davis, to find that his family’s car had been vandalized.

“My dad’s in the middle of the road, sweeping glass out of the road like he works at a hate-crime barbershop,” Minhaj says, describing his surprise at his father’s placid reaction. First in Hindi, and then in English, he recalls his father’s words: “These things happen, and these things will continue to happen; that’s the price we pay for being here.” Having routed his viewers to an emotional cliff, Minhaj holds them there. The camera trains on his telegenic face, his friendly eyes wide with awe at the memory. That was the moment, he says, when he realized that he and his father come from two very different generations. “I was born here, so I actually had the audacity of equality,” he says. Before the story becomes merely tragic, Minhaj guides the audience back down to the valley of levity: “Dad, you’re the guy that’ll argue with the cashier at Costco when he doesn’t let you return used underwear. And now you want to be the bigger man?”

Minhaj’s tales of racism can at times feel like service comedy—personal memories excavated for teachability—but his best barbs have enough teeth to rescue his show from earnestness. (In that sense, he’s similar to the black comedian W. Kamau Bell, who recently found shared ground with Minhaj on a pre-election episode of the podcast “Politically Re-Active.”) In the show’s title bit, Minhaj recounts how, in his senior year of high school, he defied his parents’ strict rules to sneak out of the house and attend the high-school prom with his crush, Bethany Reed. Minhaj expertly draws out the sense of adolescent anticipation leading up to the event; he biked over to Bethany’s house in his suit, taking care that his pant legs didn’t get caught in the spokes. When he arrived, though, he discovered another boy already there, placing a corsage on her wrist. “Oh, my God, honey, did Bethany not tell you?” Bethany’s mom told Minhaj. “We have a lot of family back home in Nebraska, and we’re gonna be taking a lot of photos tonight, so we don’t think it’d be a good fit. Do you need a ride home?” Reflecting on the Reeds’s particular brand of racism, Minhaj says, “I’d eaten off their plates. I’d kissed their daughter. I didn’t know that people could be bigoted even as they were smiling at you.”

Later, Minhaj gives a coda. Years after they’d graduated from high school, he got a Facebook message from Bethany asking if he could hook her up with tickets to a comedy show he was hosting. “Listen, would love to get you some tix, but . . .” Minhaj says, relishing the pause. “We’re gonna be taking some pics tonight, and I don’t think it’d be a good fit.” His father, learning of this exchange, was disappointed that his son didn’t practice forgiveness.

“Homecoming King” is a show crafted for an audience of second-generation Americans of color, the cultural misfits who make up what Minhaj calls a New Brown America. He is skilled at generalizing the behavior of the “brown dads” and “brown moms” who raised kids like him: “Birthdays aren’t their thing. Every immigrant father feels like if they brought you to the United States, well, ‘Happy birthday!’ ” he says. A phrase in Hindi recurs throughout the show. It’s what Minhaj’s father says when he is concerned about breaking with traditions: log kya kyenge—what will people think? Minhaj’s special distills a lifetime of grappling with that refrain; it is a loving arbitration, by a member of the New Brown America, on how to be a son of his country and his parents at once.